everyone is talking about how they patched their game... i didn't. does that mean there's something wrong with my game?

sorry, i seemed to have posted this message twice cause it wasn't being shown on my browser and i thought it didn't get put on the page. sorry. but still answer please!

There are several issues that can come up in unpatched. It is a really good idea to update your game.

The game is stable and quite playable out of the box. But, as with other games, patching is recommended to quash the bugs, some of which could be show stoppers if you are unlucky enough to encounter them.

why do some people have patches for SoA?

Andrew
Patches for games are inevitable these days, unfortunately. When a game is released there are always bugs that have not been squashed. Some are minor & it may be possible to work around them or live with them. Others are show stoppers, in that it is serious enough to stop the player from progressing further in the game. For instance, Pool of Radiance 2 when it first shipped had this huge bug with the uninstaller. If you installed the game, and later decided to uninstall it (as opposed to simply deleting the game from your hard disk) it would corrupt your operating system (OS) & render your computer unusable.
Sometimes patches also address play balance issues, or loopholes that players can exploit to gain more exp or gold then what they legitimately could.
Like I said, afaik SoA is OK out of the box, but it never hurts to apply the latest patch which you can get from Bioware, the people who made BG2.

[ 08-06-2002, 02:04 AM: Message edited by: Hayashi ]

To clarify further:

1. Patches are developed & released by the people who made the game. These are official patches, and can be found on the publisher's and/or developer's web site.

2. There are unofficial patches amde by 3rd party persons. Usually these address issues not covered by the official patch, but are considered serious enough by the gaming community to warrant attention. Baldurdash is a fine example. In it, Kevin Dorner (together with a few others) have made a series of fixes & tweaks for BG & BG2. These fixes and tweaks improve the game, like correcting in-game descriptions of items, making minor modifications to certain objects so that they conform to AD&D rules, etc.

3. Then there are mods (short for modifications) where someone creates a new add-in for the game. The Darkest Day, for example, is a mod for BG2. Much like ToB, it adds new items, quests, spells, NPCs and kits.

Hope this clarifies things up a bit for you.

thankyou for clearing that up! sorry about hijacking your other post, but i was desperate and i had been asking the question for a couple days without a good answer... hope there are no hard feelings!